The bridge of shadow worked. Over the course of a month, the Shadow-Thorn spread through the network of hidden canyons, creating a fragile, spider-webbing ecosystem of shade and life-aspected magic in the heart of the desolate desert fringe. It was a self-sustaining outpost, a forward base from which Elias could finally project his senses.
From his Spire, he could now use his raven-relay to perform a limited Wraith Walk, sending his spirit across the bridge of thorns into the canyons. From there, he could drift out, a ghost in the burning sun, and finally observe the Hegemony's Arclight facility.
It was more formidable than he had imagined. It wasn't just a tower; it was a sprawling, subterranean complex hidden beneath a featureless expanse of sand, with only a few fortified bunkers and the great, humming Arclight tower visible on the surface. Legions of mages from the Circle and Hegemony engineers moved between the structures, their auras of ordered magic a stark contrast to the chaotic desert heat.
At the heart of the complex, deep underground, he could sense it: the Bound Celestial Shard. It was not a "hot" energy like the sun or a "cold" energy like his necromancy. It was a silent, overwhelming pressure, a point of infinite density that warped the very fabric of reality around it. It was a chained god, and they were using its dreams to power their weapon.
For weeks, he performed cautious reconnaissance, mapping the complex, learning the patrol schedules, identifying the key figures. The project leader was a powerful Archmage named Lyra, a woman whose personal aura felt like perfectly polished glass—sharp, clear, and unyieldingly logical. His old nemesis, Praetor Kaelen, the Spymaster, was also present, overseeing the project's security. This was their masterwork.
He needed to get closer, to understand the mechanism of the Arclight weapon itself. But the sublevels, where the real work was being done, were shielded by potent, layered wards that shredded his wraith-form upon contact. He could observe the surface, but the heart of the facility remained a black box.
Then, Labyrinthos, his Spymaster on the ground, provided a potential key. Through one of his desert contacts, he learned of a specific convoy schedule. Once every three months, a specialized transport delivered refined cryo-crystals, necessary for cooling the Celestial Shard's containment field. The delivery was made through a single, heavily shielded service tunnel. For a brief, twenty-minute window during the transfer, a small section of the sublevel wards had to be momentarily lowered.
It was an opening. A tiny, dangerous window. Elias devised a plan. He would not send a Golem or an agent. The risk was too high. He had to go himself—or at least, a part of him.
He forged a new vessel. A Geist-Stone. It was a smooth, black river stone, hollowed out and filled with a complex latticework of psychically conductive filaments. Into this, he poured a significant portion of his own consciousness. Not a copy, not a simple command, but a true, translocated piece of his mind. If the stone was destroyed, a part of him would be violently ripped away, a wound that could take years to heal, if ever. It was the greatest risk he had ever taken.
Aegis and Labyrinthos, under the cover of a fierce desert sandstorm that Elias's bound elementals helped 'encourage,' placed the Geist-Stone on the roof of the cryo-crystal transport vehicle.
The convoy entered the service tunnel. The outer wards lowered. Elias, sitting on his stone throne, projected his will across the continent, through his raven, across the bridge of thorns, and into the Geist-Stone. His consciousness snapped into the stone vessel. He was inside.
He could "see" through arcane vibrations, feeling the layout of the tunnel. The convoy stopped at a security checkpoint. He seized the opportunity. He willed the stone to roll off the vehicle, falling silently onto a nearby conduit pipe, hidden in the shadows. The convoy moved on. The inner blast doors opened and then closed behind it. The wards were re-engaged.
He was trapped. But he was in.
He began his silent, patient exploration, rolling the stone through maintenance shafts and conduits, a being of pure thought in a pebble-sized vessel. He found what he was looking for: the main power conduits that led from the Celestial Shard's containment chamber to the Arclight emitter array in the main tower.
The energy flowing through them was unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was the pure, conceptual power of creation, of light, of gravity—the song of the stars themselves. It was beautiful and terrifying. He spent hours, which felt like minutes, just observing, analyzing, learning the frequency, the harmonics, the flow. His mind, honed by decades of logical analysis, drank it in. He wasn't just seeing their weapon; he was learning its language.
He had gathered enough data. The risk of lingering was too great. He began his retreat, rolling his stone vessel back towards the service tunnel, planning to wait for the next convoy to escape.
But as he moved through a conduit near the main containment chamber, something changed. The serene, powerful hum of the Celestial Shard… faltered. It spiked, then shifted. And a new, singular voice entered his mind. It wasn't a broadcast. It was a direct, intimate whisper, speaking not to his ears, but to the very core of his being.
'I see you, little shadow.'
Elias froze. The voice was not hostile. It was ancient, amused, and impossibly powerful. It was the Shard itself. The "bound" artifact was not a passive power source. It was a conscious, aware entity.
'They have put me in a cage of logic and iron,' the Shard whispered, its thoughts like novas in his mind. 'They think they control me. But you… you are different. You build with shadow and rust. You listen to the bones of the world. You are interesting.'
It was a trap. Not Lyra's. Not Kaelen's. It was the Shard's. It had felt his presence the moment he entered, and it had been observing him, learning him, just as he had been learning its power.
'They seek to use my song to create silence,' the Shard continued, a sense of cosmic irony coloring its thoughts. 'But you… you could help me sing a new song. Let me show you.'
Before Elias could react, a tendril of the Shard's immense power bypassed the conduits and lanced directly into his Geist-Stone. It wasn't an attack. It was a gift. A flood of pure, unrefined cosmic knowledge poured into him—the secrets of gravity, the language of light, the architecture of creation itself.
It was too much. His mind, as vast and ordered as it was, could not contain an ocean of stellar knowledge. His consciousness fractured. His connection to his body, a thousand miles away, wavered. Alarms screamed through his Fortress Mind as system after system overloaded.
Back in the Spire, Elias's physical body slumped on its throne. His eyes went dim. A thin trickle of black blood dripped from his nose. The warm, constant trickle of Votive Essence from Sunstone sputtered and died, its connection point—his conscious will—shattered. His skeletal servants and living golems across the Blackwood froze in place, their animating force cut off. The ravens in his forge fell from the rafters like stones. The canopy, for the first time in decades, was without its Warden. His mind was not dead, but it was... unmoored. Lost in an ocean of starlight, a prisoner of a gift too great to comprehend, trapped in a stone pebble in the heart of his enemy's greatest fortress.
And on a watchtower on the southern plains, a Hegemony officer using a powerful scrying-glass, a device designed to detect large-scale magical flux, turned to his commander.
"Sir," he said, his voice trembling with excitement. "The ambient energy field of the Blackwood… the entire damned thing just… flatlined. It's gone. Sir… I think the Warden is dead."